A new painkiller is being designed that won't get users high, and it could save thousands of lives

Thousands of Americans are dying from opioid
overdoses, but patients with chronic pain are
finding it hard to get medications they need.

Recent solutions to the problem have focused on
making pain pills tougher to abuse, but research suggests
that's not enough.

Scientists are now focused on creating
painkillers that don't cause feelings of
euphoria.

In the last 16 years, more than
183,000 Americans have died from overdoses related
to prescription opioids. As a result, policymakers have tried to
make the medications harder to get.

Those efforts seem to have had a
somewhat positive impact on the rate of overdoses,
but have left patients with chronic pain in a tough spot.
Not only is it sometimes hard for these people to get their
medications, the increased public attention around opioid risk
has made some of them concerned about taking the
drugs in the first place — or even having them in the
house.

That's why a handful of companies are focused on creating an
entirely new type of painkiller — one that won't get people
hooked. One of those companies is Nektar Therapeutics, which is
currently studying a new drug candidate that enters the
brain too slowly to cause the feelings of euphoria that many
painkillers are known for.

"We have the possibility of being the first new opioid in almost
25 years," Dr. Stephen K. Doberstein, Nektar's senior vice
president and chief scientific officer, told Business Insider. "I
think we’ve reinvented the opioid molecule."

A drug that enters the brain too slowly to make people feel good

While drugs like oxycodone are excellent at reducing pain, they
can also produce powerful feel-good sensations that can be
addictive. But recent studies of Nektar's new painkiller, which
is still in clinical trials, suggest that it wouldn't
cause any such high.

The drug is called NKTR-181, though Doberstein likes to call it
just "181".

Epiodyne, a company started by a research team at the University
of San Francisco's School of Pharmacy, is designing
a pain drug that wouldn't trigger a surge in dopamine, a
chemical messenger in the brain that is involved in emotions like
desire and pleasure. Other companies have also been showing an
interest in such research as opioid overdose deaths continue to
spike.

Still, the vast majority of development has gone into making
so-called "abuse deterrent" drug formulations — pills designed to
be impossible to melt down and inject or smash and snort. Since
2010, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved a handful
of these pills, and
30 more are currently in development.

"Everyone just wants to figure out how to lock it up in a pill
better," Doberstein said.

But there's little evidence that those deterrents alone
can stem the tide of overdose deaths. Promoting
abuse-resistant drugs could encourage doctors to continue
overprescribing them. And most of the new pills can still be
abused when swallowed.

"I am not convinced that we can engineer our way out of this
epidemic, and I would caution against over-relying on
abuse-deterrent formulations to do so," Dr. Caleb Alexander, an
associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins,
told the Associated Press last year.

That's where Nektar hopes to come in.

"Our goal here is to have a safe and effective medicine that
doctors and patients can feel confident that they’re not going to
get high from," says Doberstein. "That's something I'm excited
about."